b) The political economy of the production of subjectivity:

 a critique of liberal rationality

 Foucault introduces a definition of biopower within his wider reflections on the role of a political discourse on subjectivity. After all, the idea that a social function of knowledge does not necessarily correspond to its truth value is in itself of little innovative import. Pointing to the interrelation and mutual constitution of practices of power and knowledge had already been a preoccupation of the tradition that ran through historical materialism and sociology of knowledge. What is of importance in his definition of biopower and discipline is the analysis of the effects of a horizontal application of knowledge across society in the formation and the shaping of subjectivities. It is in this context that we also place his reflections on the materiality of language and the status of man in the positivity of knowledge. The problem of man’s finitude and the circularity of the human sciences are there seen as productive of effects at the ontological level. What is at stake is not only self cognition but also the ordering of our universe according to criteria of Sameness and self referentiality.  

Language is ‘rooted’ in the active subject, not in the things perceived. It is not a memory that duplicates representation. We speak because we act, not because recognition is a means of cognition. […] Representation ceased to have validity as the laws of origin of living beings, needs and words. It no longer deploys the table into which things have been ordered. It is not their identity that beings manifest in representation, but the external relation they establish with human beings. Representation is their effect, their blurred counterpart in consciousness which apprehends and reconstitutes them. It is the phenomenon – appearance – of an order that now belongs to things in themselves and to their interior law. Man’s finitude is heralded in the positivity of knowledge. At the foundation of all empirical positivities we discover a finitude. In the heart of empiricity there’s indicated an obligation to work backwards – or downwards – to an analytic of finitude in which man’s being will be able to provide a foundation in their own positivity for all those forms that indicate to him that he is not infinite.[1]

 The result of this process is the overturning of analysis and metaphysics, whereby in place of a metaphysics of representations and the infinite we find a metaphysics of life, labour and language; whilst the analysis of living beings, desires and words is replaced by an analytics of finitude: the endless task of Modern criticism. This is the place of structuralism and hermeneutics, of formalism and phenomenology, and finally of psychoanalysis and ethnology opened up by the appearance of man, their task being to ‘fill in the gap in the continuum between representation and being’[2].

 For instance, in the classical episteme, both for Physiocrats and Utilitarians – who occupy opposite stances in relation to the analysis of value production- value has the same function in economics as the verb has in language: as the verb links and articulates two names and makes it possible to build a proposition, so does value link two things (regarded as equivalent in their utility) and makes their exchange possible. This is only possible in so far as continuity between things and their respective representation is assumed: a relation of continuity and visibility that is broken down with the emergence of the modern episteme. 

 Humanism permeates contemporary historical consciousness in a way that traps thought in a circularity of intents. ‘And it is a fact that, at least since the seventeenth century, what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion, science or politics. Humanism serves to colour and justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged to take recourse’.[3]

 The questions opened up by The Order of Things is one concerning the relation of truth and being: is there a role and possibility for a non - formal ontology, one that is not exhausted in the analytics of finitude intended as a science of measurements, that also avoids a linear historicisation trapped in the interpretative framework of hermeneutical exegesis? Crucially, the question posed by the works on ethics, especially in L’Herméneutique du sujet, is: can the task of a critical ontology of ourselves remain autonomous from the human sciences and discourses of medicine, politics and religion?

 We have explored these two questions in the previous sections: it is now time to look into the political implications of such positive ontology and ethics. Foucault keeps working on the instruments for a desertion of the circularities that trap us in a dialectics of dependency. As he had deconstructed that of man as subject and object of discourse in his critique of the human sciences by reflecting on the position of man in the world through Kant’s Anthropology; as he had done through the deconstruction of the circularity of the hermeneutics of self transformation and self knowledge by pointing to the interstices opened up by Stoic ethics. Now, through a critique of the paradigm of sovereignty we shall see how he points us out of the vicious circle grounded on the symmetrical opposition between power and resistance. Foucault provides us with invaluable tools for understanding the meaning and possibility of autonomy of thought and action in our days. The interrogations on the workings of power in discourses on sovereignty, the subject, history, war and the state of exceptions posit the urgency for us to rethink the notion of resistance and politics in our days.

 Foucault’s work on discipline and biopolitics is where the most overtly 'political' emphasis is found but the analyses of historical discourses equally address the problem of subjectivity and the possibility of what we might call an alternative anthropology in so far as through them, the empirical positivity of knowledge throws light on what is productively and indicatively a determining factor in the emergence of practices of subjectivation on the one hand, and changes in technologies of the self on the other. Foucault seeks to highlight the dependence of present discourses and practices of resistance on notions that stem from the augmentation of the efficiency of regulation. Foucault’s genealogies are carried out within the framework of a valorisation of the positive and productive force of power. His genealogical work on medicine, criminology and sovereignty shows that the productivity of power is realised through policies that allow for the formation of the individual through plans of disciplinary normalisation and of the population through biopolitical interventions on a mass scale. We cannot be satisfied with current forms of struggle demanding protection at the level of rights, health or communication: they are induced struggles that reinforce rather than opposing the very mechanisms that produce risk in order to generate security.

 The relation between risk and security is an important one in our days. As a reflection on actualité Foucault’s writings acquire a greater force in our times of war on terror. In this spirit we will look at his reflections on the police state, political economy, political science and liberalism in order to arrive at an idea of governmentality on which the debate on technologies of the self and biopolitical production can be grounded.

The emergence of biopower.

For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.[4]

 The mainstream literature that still constitutes a large part of the hegemonic paradigm of political theory in our times adopts the notions of the workings of power as sovereignty, right, duty and contract as the foundation of any possible reflection and advancement on the idea of government and its exercise.  In Discipline and Punish Foucault carries out a thorough critique of the foundations of the political theory of sovereignty by introducing his notion of disciplines. Unlike the judicial power of sovereign right, these were concerned with the practice of power on the individual and his body.[5]

 As a reflection on actualité, Foucault will later observe that a problem arises when in reacting to mechanisms of disciplinary power we make recourse to a theory of sovereignty and right, thus trusting one mechanism of power to be fairer than the other. Part of his critical genealogy of the political rationality of liberalism consists in laying out the contours of the discourse on government and its relation to political economy as one whereby the state or political institutions are called upon as arbiters of right. Foucault questions the supposed neutrality of the legal apparatus and goes back to tracing the historical emergence of ‘justice as fairness’ to the moment when duels and violence ceased to be expedient for the practice of acquisition and exchange.   These considerations are to be taken in the context of the resurgence of civil liberties struggles and the appeal to a politics of identity that needed to be reaffirmed and sought legitimacy in the sphere of rights.[6] Foucault questions the idea that discipline can be fought by means of an appeal to rights by introducing the notion of war in the analysis of the rationality of strategies and calculations in politics and struggle. This is the one of the most interesting aspects of his 1976 lectures series called ‘Il faut défendre la société’: the setting up of the philosophical and juridical discourse on sovereignty - the foundation of the political theory of a universal rights bearing subject – against the historical political discourse on politics as war, with its ensuing perspectivism, a discourse where ‘truth functions as a weapon to be used for a partisan victory’[7] and that looks, beneath political institutions, at the permanent war present in society.[8]

 The analysis of biopower thus aims at highlighting the introduction of a new element both with respect to judicial power and disciplinary techniques. The theory of sovereign right functioned on the basis of the pre-determined and complementary notions of individual and society, which, at the outcome of the sovereign constitutive process, turn into the contracting individual and the social body as constituted through the contract (whether voluntary or implicit). The notion of biopower introduces a new element to the analysis of power: biopower deals with neither of the two symmetrical axes constituted around the political theorisation of sovereignty: society (as the judicial body defined by law and the contract) and the individual-body. What historically emerges with the introduction of biopower as a practice is the notion of a ‘social body’ as the object of government. In other words, it is the emergence of a preoccupation with population: biopolitics is concerned with population as a political and scientific problem as well as a biological issue of the exercise of power. Thus, biopower does not act on the individual a posteriori, as a subject of discipline in the diverse forms of rehabilitation, normalisation and institutionalisation; it acts on the population in a preventive fashion. Its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation with optimising life chances and it operates through surveys for the prevention of epidemics and scarcity. Its government works through management and the regulative mechanisms that are able to account for aleatory and ‘unpredictable’ phenomena on a global scale, by determining an equilibrium and keeping events within an acceptable average. Biopower is not just discipline but regulation on a global scale, it is ‘the power to make live. Power won’t make die, but it will regulate mortality.’[9]

 According to Foucault, with the emergence of biopower, the power mechanisms that run through body, organism, discipline to institution are progressively substituted and in places juxtaposed by those taking population, biological processes, regulatory mechanisms and the state as their operative field, even though some elements such as the police are part both of the first and the second, being concerned with discipline as well as security.  

What we understand by biopower is the operative practice of liberalism. As we shall later see, Foucault’s analysis of modern political rationality demonstrates how liberalism needs the police to reduce government. What appears to be the almost physical action-reaction chain that characterises his notion of power/resistance challenges the idea that there is a possibility to transcend one's position by positing a challenge from the outside by asserting that in biopolitics transcendence is impossible since there is no outside. We will later see how Hardt and Negri’s thesis in Empire is informed by this premise.

 Towards a Critique of governmental reason  

Foucault's 1979 lecture course entitled ‘Du gouvernement des vivants’ continue this analysis of the discourse of sovereignty in modernity. Foucault there specifically analyses the liberal mode of government. The governmentality of liberalism in its ideology is presented as self-critical in so far as it problematises state intervention and ‘minimises it’. Foucault asserts that the entry of political economy in political discourse not only sanctioned the end of the debate on the natural right to rule, but also introduced the idea of a truth about and a science of governing. The question of truth and self-limitation of government is introduced by political economy and in Foucault's words, it supplants the theory of sovereignty with the art of governing, and opposes to the maximalist idea of la raison d'état, the 'minimalist' idea of 'liberal government' which emerges parallel to the German studies on Polizeiwissenschaft. The idea that emerges through these studies is that liberal governmentality produces as well as organises freedoms, alongside security strategies, control and surveillance geared to prevent the dangers inherent to the production of freedom, together with the ideology of 'dangerous' living aimed to turn individuals into 'abnormal', 'monsters' etc. In fact, liberalism, the individuating practices of disciplines and the life management of biopower are co-extensive in purpose and application. They co-exist and are mutually interdependent and pre-constitute the field of play for the intransitivity of freedom. For Foucault, the intransitivity of freedom means that freedom is always present. One is not free to be unfree.  In his late essay on ‘The Subject and Power’[10] Foucault defines government more clearly as the structuring of the field of action for others. In Foucault’s genealogy of the notion of governmentality, the latter emerges at the historical juncture where the theory of sovereignty is substituted by the ‘art of governing’ (the how-to of states, how to manage individuals, wealth and things). With the appearance of the problem of population and economics finally the art of governing supplants that of sovereignty. Biopower, fully operational by the 18th century, is a government that no longer functions through the administrative or juridical apparatus of sovereignty, but through control and norms. As Foucault writes: ‘Maybe what is most important for our modernity, for our actuality, is not the statalisation of society, but what I’d call the governmentalisation of the state.’[11] If the theory of sovereignty was concerned with how to ensure obedience in a territory and a population through the application of the law, the art of government aims to dispose of individuals and things in the most convenient of manners.  

Sovereignty is not exercised on things, but above all on a territory and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it. […] The definition of government in no way refers to territory. One governs things: men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities […], men in relation to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking; men in their relation to that other kind of things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death etc. Thus the art of government concerns things understood in this way, this imbrication of men and things.[12]

 Following Foucault’s reasoning, the problematisation of governmentality at the outset was one of the government of the self (concerning morality), the government of the family (concerning economics) and the science of ruling the state (politics). In the art of government, contrary to the theory of sovereignty that sought to establish the limits and field of operation and defences for the ruling political power with respect to all other kinds of powers, what matters is how to establish a continuity between these three elements of governance, and to this end the science of politics needs to incorporate and subsume the management of the economy. For Foucault the subsumption of economic rationality into the art of governance is crucial for it paves the way for a discourse of political rationality for which development, the neutralisation of social conflicts and the control and surveillance of society as a whole becomes crucial. Civil society inserts itself in this juncture to ensure the continuity between the state and the policing of individuals. The main question posed by the emergence of liberalist political rationality was: what is the raison d’être of government? According to Foucault, the key to answer this question lies in an analysis of society itself, rather than some notion of law and obedience: why and how much does society need governing? Thus the question of government is one of control over people and in the discourse of liberalism one can see how discipline and democracy necessarily cohabit in order to make government as economic and efficient as possible.

‘Il faut défendre la société’

 In the course delivered at the Collège de France in 1976, named ‘Il faut défendre la société’ Foucault develops the notion of political historicism and traces its emergence at the end of the 16th century. The 1976 lectures present a history of power, parallel to his history of sexuality. The introduction sets out two traditions running through historiography: one can be identified with Wilhelm Reich and refers to the repressive mechanism of power. The other is ascribed to Friedrich Nietzsche and investigates the foundation of relations of power as one of warring forces confronting one another. Foucault asks whether these are reconcilable positions since repression is nothing but the political consequence of war, just as oppression, within the classical theory of political right, is the abuse of sovereignty within the juridical order.[13]

 The course outlines the notorious reversal of C. von Clausewitz’s formula[14] and traces the main characteristics of the historical discourse of what he calls the war of races. The war of races is analysed as the opposite pole of the historical discourse of sovereignty that refers to Roman law and right. Foucault regards the discourse on the war of races as a counter-history, which through the description of rituals, ceremonies and myths, operates as an intensifier of power. On the other hand, the history of sovereign power is the history that creates the monuments that he referred to in the Archaeology of Knowledge, one that will crystallise into the present. Through the counter-history of the war of races and its genealogy he aims to look at the silent struggles of what remained in the shadow of the history of sovereignty. We can see that for Foucault this is an example of the buried historical knowledge and erudition which he aims to bring to light, as we have seen in part I. Apart from a lecture on England and Thomas Hobbes, the rest of the course is mostly dedicated to the histories of Henry de Boulainvilliers, of comte de Montlosier and France and ends with an analysis of the related notions of revolution and racism through their inscription in the biopolitical discourse of war in the modern state. In his analysis Foucault takes up anti-historicism and tries to show how a certain historical political discourse, unlike political theory and jurisprudence, has adopted the war model as a tool of analysis of political relations.[15] Foucault's genealogy of this counter-history describes the mechanisms through which power carries on war in times of peace, namely through disciplines and later biopower.

 As we have seen with Agamben, an analysis of peace is complementary to one of the state of exception: Foucault claims that nowhere is the notion of peace more crucial than in Hobbes. His interest in Hobbes dwells on his outline the three principles of a theory of sovereignty: the Subject, the Unity of Power and the Law. According to Foucault, Hobbes is the thinker of peace par excellence, because his idea that politics can pose an end to war was functional to hide the war of his period.[16] For Hobbes it is the state of war that is a permanent threat to sovereignty, rather than war itself. Foucault looks into Hobbes in order to introduce the birth of biopower and the war of races, whereby once the One is constituted under the Unity of Power, the Subject becomes a biological entity that needs an Other for its own reproduction. Here we can see the similarities with Agamben’s critical genealogy of the term people. In Foucault’s lectures, the state of Britain in Hobbes’ times is analysed at length and described as the field of emergence of the idea of the 'war of races', which is parallel and co-functional to the notion of civil society, whereby a state of war internal to a supposedly unitary sovereign body functions on the basis of an operation of internal colonialism. Foucault points out that before Hobbes, in political theory, there existed a whole discourse based on notions of conquest, war and usurpation that looked at the ‘relation of domination of a race on another and at the permanent threat of a revolt of the defeated against the winners’.[17] Hobbes’ aim was to silence the historico-political discourse that was operative in the struggles of his time and that looked at domination rather than sovereignty and law. His natural jurisprudence aimed at neutralising this radical discourse, which Foucault on the contrary wants to bring back into play.

 This falls into his project of critique as one that as we have seen requires a resurrection of subjugated knowledge and its coupling with historical erudition. Foucault explores the idea that the juridical concept of power entails thinking power in function of war, whereby power relations are relations of force and peace is nothing but silent war. A study of political struggles in times of civil peace helps one decipher the form of war and that the history of peace is a history of the continuation of war. This reversal of Clausewitz’s formula is crucial for Foucault since it directly points to the juridical organisation of public law as an effect of surface or appearance and voices the existence of all the disciplinary operations that render the real function of power that of conducting war in other forms. In these terms, the juridical-political reading of power in terms of sovereignty is defined by Foucault as a trap, created by power itself. It is the way power uses to speak of itself.[18] Foucault regards this move to coincide with the birth of dialectics and philosophy of history. In fact, he regards the disqualification of historicism in knowledge to be concomitant with the attempt to exorcise this war paradigm. As he puts it: ‘War is conducted through the history that is made and through that which is told’.[19] He had already analysed the profound anti-historicism of the human sciences in The Order of Things. For Foucault, this is due to the fact that from the 18^th century onwards Western knowledge has been organised around the ideas of peace and order and has had to disqualify struggle and war as possible registers of truth. ‘This is what makes historicism unbearable to us and with it the sort of indissociable circularity between historical knowledge and the wars that it talks about whilst being traversed by them’.[20]

 For Foucault, the analysis of the discourse of war and that of the emergence of biopolitics and the notion of people are inextricably linked. In this respect, he analyses Boulainvilliers’ method of writing histories during the period that precedes the French revolution and observes that the emergence of the discourse on barbarism -as opposed to that of the noble savage- characterises the epistemic field of this historical moment that will sanction the anti-historicism of the bourgeoisie, which then would be later recuperated during the French revolution. In a concerted effort of jurisprudence and anthropology, these two figures are pitted against one another: whilst the noble savage in the discourse on civil society and political theory was presented as a bearer of rights, a juridical subject and a homo economicus, the figure of the barbarian was one outside recuperation and inclusion in so far as it directly symbolised a relation of domination. At this time, according to Foucault, what had once been the historical discourse of the aristocracy undergoes a tactical generalisation. The term tactical is crucial here, for Foucault specifies that it entails a function that deeply differs from that normally ascribed to what is called ‘ruling class ideology’. This function is rather that of a dispositif of knowledge/power, which in so far as it can be described as a tactic, is also transferable.  According to Foucault, the tactics of this dispositif are displayed on three directions: that of nationality (language), that of class (economy), and that of race (biology). Here we can see the same tripartite structure found in The Order of Things (language, labour, life). The question of tactics clarifies much of what was left ambiguous in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge:  

The tactical reversibility of discourse is a direct function of the homogenisation of its rules of formation. It is the regularity of the epistemic field and the homogeneity within the mode of discourse formation that permits its use in struggles, which on the other hand are extra-discursive. It is for this methodological reason that I have insisted on the repartition of different discursive tactics within a coherent, regular and strictly formed historical-political field.[21]

 Hence this tactical generalisation entails a re-assessment of the strategy by means of the genealogy of struggle and is reconstituted through them. By reversibility and transferability of tactical dispositif of knowledge/power, Foucault means that:  

One can easily go from one of these histories to another only individuating few simple transformations in the fundamental propositions. We are here faced with an epistemic grille that is extremely tight and made up by all historical discourses independently from what they claim as their theses and political aims. But the fact that this epistemic grille is so tight does not mean that all think the same way. On the contrary, it even constitutes the condition of possibility for thinking otherwise, and makes it possible for this difference to be politically pertinent.[22]

 The emergence of a discourse on barbarism is thus in direct opposition to the constitutionalist ambitions of the bourgeoisie. The latter, by calling for an a-historical recourse to natural right, had attempted to exorcise the historicism of the old aristocracy, which had posited war rather than the political theory of jurisprudence as the foundation of political relations. The eventual victory of the third estate also sanctions the emergence of a dialectics of history and a philosophy of history, whereby the nation is to be referred to an idea of universalism and its relation to the particular and (in E. J. Sieyès[23]) this comes to coincide with the third estate, the only social force that can have a universalising power beyond the particularism of group belonging. This will also allow for a history of civil relations to substitute that of war relations.   

 In relation to the role of the present in historical analysis Foucault observes that from the 18th century authors from different political backgrounds and perspectives start adopting two main grilles of intelligibility as their reference point: domination and totalisation.

 One is constituted by the attempt to write history according to the present and with the view of universalising discourse, starting off from the idea of the state and taking it to be the object of seizure of power by different social formations. Here the present enters historical discourse as the moment of the expression of universalism, the immanence force of truth that reveals itself and the past in the real. The other works along the lines of a history written according to the paradigm of war and struggle between different ‘nations’ or races with different internal discourses attempting to seize power by dominating other social forces. This sees the present as a moment of ‘forgetfulness’ and its task as that of wakening consciousness through recourse to ‘a reactivation of the primitive moment in the order of knowledge’. As we can see, the latter notion of power is symmetrical rather than incorporative.

 He provides as examples the histories of comte de Montlosier and Augustin Thierry. Montlosier represents the ‘right’ of the aristocracy and provides an elaboration of the historical driving forces leading up to the French Revolution in terms of the monarch using the people to take power away from the aristocracy. Absolute monarchy invests the people with the task of revolting against the power of the aristocracy in a way that ultimately sanctions its own legitimacy. In this sense, struggle and revolts are political tools in the hands of the monarch.[24]

 Thierry, on the other hand, justifies the same event on the lines of a dichotomisation between rural and urban sites of power that increased in the 19^th century, whereby the urban centre achieves predominance with the expansion of commerce and other forms of the economy and finally takes power over rural sites, imposing its own discourse upon the opposing one. These struggles are not identified according to a military order but rather seen in their civil status. The present is seen as the ‘moment of fullness’ where all is reconciled and war becomes one instrument of this reconciliation rather than the central force behind its unfolding.

 The latter form of historical writing sanctions the birth of philosophy of history in its dialectical guise: ‘History and philosophy will come to the same question: what is, in the present, the agent of the universal? What is, in the present, that which constitutes the truth of the universal? This is the question asked by history, but also, now, the question asked by philosophy. The dialectic is born.’[25]

 It was only with the emergence of revolutionary discourse that the history of the war of races is reactivated. This posits, beyond the political formalism of the third estate,[26] the question of what Agamben calls the fundamental biopolitical fracture.

The history of races is a counter-history. It aims at showing the sealed truth of power, how kings, sovereigns and law rest their power on abuse and murder; unlike Roman history, where the task of memory was to reassure the non-obliteration and the permanence of law and continuous growth of the splendour of power. Power is unjust not because it has decayed since its golden times, but simply because it does not belong to us. The discourse of biblical character that develops from the end of the 16th century aims at declaring a war on law. For instance, Petrarch asked in the middle Ages: is there anything, in history, that is not an elegy of Rome ? The birth of Europe is sanctioned by blood and war and by this historical discourse that finally detached Indo-European civilisations from the Roman inheritance. […] Nowadays, what we ask, following Petrarch, is: is there anything more to history than the appeal to or fear of revolution? And we add: what if Rome conquered the revolutions again?[27]

As we have seen, this discourse is a tactical, polymorphous and mobile dispositif, which has been used by the English radical thought of the 17^th century (the Levellers and Diggers), subsequently by the French aristocracy against the power of Louis XIV, which re-emerges in the 19^th century, when it was adopted by post revolutionary attempts at making a people the subject of history, whilst some years later it was used to disqualify colonised under-races.

In the discourse where the question is the war of races, the word race does not have immediately a stable biological signification, yet it is a determinate word. There are two races when two groups have different local origins, language, religion, and have formed a political unity through war and violence. There are two major functions of historical discourse: on the one hand, the Roman history of sovereignty, on the other, the biblical discourse of exile and servitude. Revolutionary discourse is situated on the side of the discourse of war of races, as Marx said to Engels in 1882: ‘You know where we found the idea of class struggle, in the French historians who talked about race struggles’. This form of counter history, of history as vindication, cannot be detached by the emergence and the existence of a practice of counter history, insurrection.[28]

The moment historic consciousness of modern times replaces the problem of sovereignty and its foundation with the question of the revolution, there emerges a counter discourse of races that founds itself on biologism and racism. When Foucault talks of racism he is not referring to the notion of ethnicity, but to that of evolutionism. For Foucault, racism is the biopolitical update of this war paradigm, because the moment life becomes the object of power racism operates in societies of  normalisation as what makes it possible to decide and regulate what can live and what cannot.  

The discourse of the war of races, with its battles, its victories etc, will be replaced by a post-evolutionist biological theme of the war for life: differentiation of species, selection of the strongest, conservation of races etc. Equally, the theme of the binary society divided in two races and two groups foreign to one another will be replaced by that of a society biologically monist. Its character will be that of a society which is undermined by heterogeneous elements that are not essential because they do not divide the living social body into two hostile sides, but are almost accidental. There you have the idea of infiltrated foreigners or deviants as sub-products of society. Finally, the theme of a necessarily unjust state, according to the counter history of races, will be transformed into a state that is not the instrument of a race against another, but the protector of integrity and superiority and purity of one race. So, the idea of race comes to take the place of the idea of a war of races.  

From the end of the 19^th century this racism has undergone two transformations: Foucault asserts that state racism is biological and centralised; hence, whilst in Nazism state racism is inscribed back into the legend of warring races, in Stalinism the adaptation of revolutionary discourse of the war of races is inserted into scientism and police management. Foucault’s introduction of the notion of biopower is crucial for a project of an ontology of our present. As we shall see in the following section it has provided the grounds for an insightful analysis of the workings of what Deleuze later named the society of control at a number of levels, from the linguistic, to the historical, to the anthropological and political economic one. Foucault’s differentiation between disciplinary power and biopower as outlined in this lecture course draws our attention to a number of important elements for today: whilst one is certainly the centrality of the notion of struggle in understanding social relations, the other is the notion of biopower, which urges us to reflect upon a technology that operates on populations more than individuals, that is geared towards regulation more than surveillance and that in so doing reopens the debate on the political role of production and reproduction today at a time when the crisis of disciplinary mechanisms of social regulation has been sutured.